Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods: A Cross-Environmental Ethnography of 
Moral Socialization in Three Small-Scale Societies

Introduction

This project investigates how children in three small-scale Indigenous societies develop moral understandings and behavior in relation to different environments and environmental transformations. Communities across the world are experiencing rapid changes to the spaces they inhabit, such as deforestation or changing land use, forcing them to radically alter their ways of life and subsistence. But we know very little about how these may impact the moral development of children.

The Role of Environments

Environments are frequently invoked as playing important roles in the formation of morality, from the immediate home environments that provide the contexts for a child’s ontogenetic development to the evolutionary environments in which the human species evolved particular moral dispositions, such as cooperation or altruism.

However, on either timescale, environments are mostly taken for granted as providing stable contexts for human action. To date, there is no detailed study of the concrete ways in which environmental affordances and moral socialization interact, and of the consequences of environmental transformations.

Project Aim

The aim of this project is to develop a new framework for the study of the role of environments in human moral development through longitudinal, family-based ethnography in three Indigenous former hunter-gatherer communities in Paraguay, Malaysia, and Namibia.

These communities have experienced dramatic environmental changes and settled in villages or towns, but they also still go on extended foraging treks in nearby nature reserves. Comparing these two environments allows us to examine differences between past and present modes of existence and understand how environmental change impacts sociality and morality.

Methodology

Through video-based analysis, ethnography, interviews, and psychological experiments, the international team of researchers will analyze:

1. Children’s everyday interactions with caregivers and peers across environments.
2. Reflexive understandings of attendant moral values.